Daily Inspiration Quote by James F. Cooper

Cooper’s line lands like a warning shot from an early American celebrity who loved the republic but didn’t fully trust its megaphone. Calling the press a "formidable engine" is doing double work: it flatters journalism as an instrument of liberation while framing it as industrial, impersonal, and potentially uncontrollable. An engine doesn’t have opinions; it has momentum. Cooper is anxious about what happens when a democracy, out of "necessity", grants that momentum extra "license" because the cause (liberty) feels too sacred to regulate.

The fire metaphor tightens the argument. Fire is civilization’s cheat code: it cooks food, forges tools, lights homes. It also burns towns down. Cooper’s subtext is that the press is not inherently virtuous; it’s a force-multiplier. When it serves, it serves brilliantly. When it rules, it doesn’t merely persuade - it dominates, setting the terms of reality, disciplining reputations, and making public life hostage to attention and outrage.

Context matters: Cooper lived through the rise of mass-party politics and a booming penny press that turned scandal and partisanship into everyday entertainment. He also had personal reasons to bristle; after public disputes (including over property and local politics), he became a frequent target of hostile coverage and libelous rumor. So the sentence reads as both civic theory and wounded experience: the revolutionary bargain that expanded press freedom may be necessary, he concedes, but it quietly invites a new kind of power - one that answers to the market and the mob as much as to truth.